


Whatever It Takes

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Episode: s10e11 The Quest (2), Episode: s10e12 Line in the Sand, Friendship, Manipulations, Other, Season/Series 10, Secrets, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-12
Updated: 2007-07-12
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:45:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack and Vala go head-to-head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whatever It Takes

**Author's Note:**

> Set between 'Line in the Sand' and 'The Road Not Taken.'

Vala didn't know how long he'd be, and when he finally showed up, it was none too soon; she was ready to crawl out of her own skin from the boredom and stillness, and reconsidering her vow to do whatever it took to make this Terran bureaucracy bend.

He came through the door calling over his far shoulder to the aide in the anteroom, "And if Thompson digs his heels in on that retasking, you bounce it up to -- " Then hesitated for the split of a second, raising an index finger to tap his brow, as if he was trying to think of a name and couldn't; and turned back toward the door, nothing on his face but irritation at drawing a blank; and, even though she'd seen through the hesitation and was already stepping away from her spot behind the door and out of striking range, forked her one-handed against the wall, by the throat, like a wild animal. So fast that she didn't have a chance.

He had preternatural reflexes. And for the moment before he recognized her, there was nothing in the dark eyes pinning her to the wall more effectively than the hand on her windpipe. No adrenaline ferocity, no aggression, no murderous glint -- nothing but a soulless flatness. She understood the cliche now, about staring down the blank, black barrel of a gun.

"Too cliched to ask how you got in here," he said, in a steady voice so low that it wouldn't carry out to his aide but so resonant that she felt it in her bones.

"Not cliched but rather stupid, if I can't breathe," she said, and was slightly embarrassed to find that she had plenty of breath to speak with. Although recognition eased his expression into something nearly human, the pressure of his grip didn't ease with it, but it was fear and startlement tightening her throat, not him. She had an airway and she had multiple weapons -- arms free, legs free -- but she had never felt so ... outmatched. If she tried to break the choke-that-wasn't with a simple defense, it would shift before she could execute, no matter how fast she moved. She felt him feel her consider it, felt all the futures expand between and around them, all the ways that she could not escape because he would respond even as she began to act. She was good -- good enough to sense that she could not do what he was doing, anticipate the way he was anticipating. She was always thinking, conniving, strategizing. She thought too much. He was pure instinct, pure training, pure experience. What he could do was faster than thought because it bypassed thought.

He was the most dangerous person she had ever met -- the more so because she had met him before and failed to see it.

"To who?" the aide's voice called, not prompting but as though he assumed that the general had kept talking as he entered his office and the aide had just failed to catch the end of the sentence.

"Whom," the general corrected, as he looked her over with the barest flick of his gaze. He would let her go, or not, depending on what he saw; he didn't really care how she got in, and she couldn't negotiate for her own release.

"Yes, sir, that's what I asked," the aide called, puzzled now.

"Who's on first," Vala said softly, a smile twitching her mouth despite her.

The general's gaze warmed a single degree, shared amusement at the aide's confusion.

"Buckley," the general called. "Let him handle it. And hold my calls for ten minutes. DND 'til I open the door."

"Yes, sir," the aide's voice called, snappy and military and unquestioning, and General O'Neill caught the door with his toe and gave it a push that ended with it closing almost soundlessly, just the buttery slide of the doorknob tongue into its groove, the softest click.

Vala couldn't help it: she thought, _He must be extraordinary in bed_.

"Have a seat," he said, and stepped back. He gestured with the hand that had pinned her, a flicker of smile at one corner of his mouth and a half-glimpsed glint of something that she knew meant he'd heard that thought loud and clear and didn't even need to bother to say _Yes, I am_. "You have ten minutes, minus whatever time you need to get out the way you came."

"I had rather planned on your assistance with the getting _out_ part," she lied, charmingly, as she flounced into the hard chair.

"If I see you out, your visit will go on record. Do we need to call your parents?"

"I'm on forty-eight-hour leave and it wouldn't matter if I weren't. They're not _doing_ anything, General O'Neill."

"They're doing everything they can, and they'll do it better when the unit's not down _two_ men."

"You know what I mean. Business as usual, regularly scheduled missions, hoping that we _accidentally run across him_?"

"See, this is why I denied all three of your requests for an appointment. You have to do better than that argument or you've wasted my time and a lot more of your own."

"Sir," she started, because military men responded to that, and she leaned forward a little, because all men responded to that --

And he said, low and snarly and don't-insult-me-by-trying-to-fuck-with-me, "Lose the cleavage and the 'sir,' sweetheart, and talk fast."

"Lose the 'sweetheart' or you'll lose a pair of body parts," she snapped.

He smiled, slowly, almost genuinely, and said, "Better. But talk. Busy man, yadda."

"I have resources they will not allow me to tap."

"Because every time you do, your team ends up deeper in the shit."

"You know -- _you know_, in ways none of the rest of them comprehend -- that I am invaluable precisely because of my shady background and my shady connections and my shady proclivities. _Let me use them_."

He looked at her for what was, in the rarefied light-speed relativity of this encounter, a long time. Considering it -- truly considering it. Her heart shifted upward in her chest, an odd thrill of nerves. He might say yes. She truly hadn't considered what she would do if he said yes, she'd been that certain that he would say no. And in that moment she realized that banging her head against the bureaucratic wall had allowed her to feel that she _was_ doing something -- taking some action on Daniel's behalf. She had let the process of pleading-and-being-denied take the place of doing what she could do, become the totality of what she could do.

This man knew it. This man knew it before she did.

"And you know that my permission's irrelevant," he said.

"Because if I were as good as all that, I'd already be gone." She didn't know what compelled her to say it aloud. Some need to hear it from herself, she supposed. Though she rarely believed anything she heard her own voice say; she lied to herself most easily and transparently of all. "If my most valuable attribute really were my insistence on playing outside the rules as none of you lot are willing to do, I'd already be out looking, on my own."

He shrugged. "Landry won't stop you from walking through the gate. There won't be repercussions for me to protect you from. Just do it."

"But I'd have to leave the team."

"But you'd have to leave the team."

She stared at a trinket on his otherwise nearly bare desk. No family photographs, no amusing paperweights, just the brass nameplate and the blotter and the phone and a closed notebook computer and a closed folder with secrecy stamped all over it and a generic penholder and that trinket. A small carving of a shaggy animal, not one found on this planet unless it was from that absurdly bizarre Australian continent ... but she knew it wasn't Australian. The wood was Abydonian, the dark hard wood of a tree that grew by some rare water source on a desert world, and she could feel Daniel's hands on it, working it, shaping it. It was an artifact, but one he'd made, not found. Made for this man, seasoned with his feeling for this man, polished by memory and longing that year when he'd pledged his doomed heart to someone else. She had an eye for this sort of thing. She knew when she was looking at something priceless. She knew the profound, unspoken value of sentimental trinkets.

"Would they have me back?" she asked softly. "Afterwards?"

"Hey, everybody goes rogue sometime. Well, except Carter. But Teal'c's about due, and you never know when Mitchell'll have a relapse. Might as well beat the rush."

"I'll take that as a no."

"What you'll take is your chances. What you _want_ is for me to tell you that haring off after Daniel on your own is the right thing to do."

"I don't need your bloody validation."

"It's what you came here for."

"No," she said, understanding, suddenly. "No, it's not. I don't give a -- what is it you people say? A flying fuck? That sounds rather fun, actually, not something I'd dismiss so lightly. Your approval means nothing to me because you mean nothing to me. What I want from you, now that I'm here, is a tactical recommendation. I will sacrifice my place on that team, embarrassingly much as it has come to mean to me, if 'going rogue' will increase our chances of retrieving Daniel, but I am not qualified to estimate those chances. You are where the buck stops, and now that I have brought my buck to you, for whatever reasons ... I don't care what's right, General O'Neill. I want you to tell me _what will work_."

"O wise and powerful Oz," he said softly. "I'm not the wizard, Vala. I'm the man behind the curtain."

"Then that is who I shall pay attention to, as the wizard is currently _killing_ Daniel if Adria hasn't beaten him to it, and the man behind the curtain has a career's worth of experience in the black that he conveniently allows everyone around him to forget. Have you forgotten it yourself? Can you stop being the insulated uber-bureaucrat for just -- what do I have left, three minutes? -- "

"If you can beam back out of here instead of, oh, rappelling down the wall outside my window."

She blinked, briefly derailed, then used the last of her momentum to finish, " -- and be the field operative who's not afraid to get his hands dirty and achieves the objective by any means? _I can be the means_."

The straightening of his spine and shoulders and the splay of his hands were just a little too getting-down-to-business, and his tone was just a bit too brisk. "Tactical recommendation, go back to your team and stay there. You're most useful if you keep playing with the band 'til your kid starts believing you mean it -- then you can bait a hook and maybe she'll bite."

Slow and clear, pushing patience through her teeth, she said, "Defeating the Ori is Homeworld Security's objective. My objective is to rescue Daniel."

"I know."

"I know you know. So _answer me_."

"Same answer either way."

"That's not good enough!" Surging out of her chair, she snatched the knickknack from his desk, turned it over, plucked the bug off its belly, dropped the bug to the floor, ground it under her heel. "Yes you knew where it was when it was here how very inconvenient for you having to figure out where they put the next one yes there may be others I don't _care_." She leaned into the desk, cold unyielding steel against her thighs. "This is what I want to do," she said, cupping the carving in both hands and holding it out to him, offering, beseeching. "I know you want this as much as I do. I know it belongs to you." _My daughter took it,_ she said, with her hands, her body, her face. _Tell me how to return it to you_.

He didn't reach for it. He sat squared behind his desk, looking at her instead of what she held in her hands. "You love him," he said quietly.

"Not that way," she ground out -- a low growl, as though he'd threatened her, a warning against trying to make this about something it wasn't.

"And yet, love," he said.

Angry, desperate, goaded by residual helplessness and inaction, she said, "Yes! I love him! I care, and I don't even mind! And I will do anything to get him back, which is the difference between me and everyone else who loves him. Including, apparently, you, sitting there behind your big industrial steel excuse for doing _nothing_."

He sighed, and reached to touch a button on his desk phone. "Abrams?"

"Sir," the intercom said.

"Cancel that takeout order you just called in."

"Sir?"

"The MPs. Call 'em off. Ignore the shouting. Acquaintance of mine beamed in unannounced. Call Zankowski for a chat about the shield protocols. I'll be DND for another five."

"Yes, sir."

Vala's arms dropped back to her body. She looked down at the carving, shifted it to her left hand so that she could run her right index finger over the fine detail in the hard, intractable wood. She'd had no idea that Daniel was capable of producing something like this. "Sorry," she said.

"Sit," he said. "Put that down, look at me, and listen."

It was a relief to sit, because she was suddenly unutterably weary. It was a relief to have the carving out of her hands, because it had felt like holding someone else's heart -- which she had done, metaphorically, with more stolen hearts than she could count, and which Qetesh had done literally, one of hundreds of memories that she would carry in her flesh for the rest of her life. Looking up was harder, but she managed it. Mitchell had told her that the worst part wasn't risking your life but letting your friends risk theirs; she had the sick expectation that she was going to be treated to some of the same pontificating now, and the hell of it was that unlike Mitchell, this man had earned the right. What she could wave off in annoyance as sophomoric drama from Mitchell, she would have to take from O'Neill.

Nothing for it, though. She raised her chin and looked him in the eyes.

"Daniel always comes back," he said. Not lecturing after all; conveying information. Not soothing; matter-of-fact. "The crazy crap that happens to Daniel, the crazy paths that Daniel chooses -- sometimes it's like Tegalus, where you can make the catastrophic mistake of swooping in with a bigass spaceship and trying to retrieve him and getting a whole lot of people killed. Most times, not so much. Most times, you wait. You bite your nails. You go a little grayer. You go on, doing what you do, fighting the battles in front of you, and one day he turns up, and then you can go back on your ulcer medication."

She could almost buy that. Almost. "And I suppose the rest of the team has been privy to this wisdom for some time," she said, pushing, because she wasn't wholly buying it.

The right side of his mouth pulled up into that half smile. "Nope. This one's between you and me. Mitchell's too new to have a lock on it yet. Carter and Teal'c -- they don't write him off, exactly, they keep hoping and when they can they keep looking, but deep down they grieve and they move on. Every time."

"They think you write him off."

"And you believe 'em, huh?"

"I suppose I know better now."

"Yeah. You know better now. Me, I wait and watch. You have the option of going back to your team and hoping every time you go through that gate that this'll be the time, this'll be the planet where you find him, and then it'll be two of us. The other side of it is, the team's gotta go on doing what the team _does_, or it doesn't work out in the end. Everybody's gotta do what they do, without some puppetmaster jerking their strings. If what you do is go haring after him on your own, then that _is_ what you have to do. You have to choose. If I choose for you, I'll fuck it all up. Are you with me here?"

"I think I understand what you're saying. But you recommended I stick with the team."

"General O'Neill recommended you stick with the team. _I'm_ saying you gotta do what you gotta do."

She thought about that for a long moment. Then she said, "I don't bite my nails."

His gaze didn't even flicker toward her gnawed cuticles. "Yeah. Me neither." He stood, nudging his chair back. "Your five-minute extension's over. Anything else I can do for you?"

She stood as well. "I'm not sure you've done anything at all. But I realize this is the best I'm going to get."

"Whatever you decide, you owe me fifty bucks for that audio pickup. There's no surveillance in here. I installed that thing myself."

She reached up under her jacket, as if for the money, or the remote to signal for beam-out. She handed him the small framed item she withdrew instead. "This must be worth at least fifty dollars," she said. "Mint condition, and the signature and all."

"More like five hundred," he said, taking the autographed Ernie Banks baseball card in its five-by-eight frame and giving it a glance of boyish fondness. "MVP, 1958." He looked up at her, dark sharp eyes. "That means 'most valuable player.'"

"You should really display it more prominently then. Shame to hide it behind the door like that."

"Well, they haven't won a Series since 1908."

"But you keep watching, and waiting."

"Oh yeah. I'm thinkin' '08. Bring it back on the centennial."

"I can't wait a year."

He put the frame down next to the carving, stuck his hands in his pockets, and braced his butt against the desk. "Then don't. Your call."

She pressed the button on the remote in her jacket pocket, and left him there in his Pentagon cell. She materialized on her ship to find it commandeered by SGC marines to return to the Tok'ra operative she had stolen it from. While the fact of it didn't impress her -- she could imagine the aide putting two and two together and checking some list of reported-stolen spacecraft and locating the ship and scrambling a team to retake it -- the speed of it did. O'Neill must have signaled Abrams as soon as he sat down, tapped out a message on some foot pedal under his desk, something -- and she'd seen not the least indication of it.

More than impressive. And more than annoying.

Still, not a devastating loss. They beamed her back to the SGC, so at least she wasn't delayed past her scheduled check-in by some tiresome cross-continent aircraft journey, and it was a mediocre vessel at best, she'd only have used it to get out of the system and traded up at the first opportunity ... and she had already made up her mind to stick with the team. They needed her; and in Daniel's absence they needed her twice as much, because what they needed most of all was someone to question, and complain, and protest, and consider the options and the angles their military minds routinely ruled out. In fact, they needed her in Daniel's presence, too, for most of the same reasons. She gathered that he had played the dissenting role, once -- given the outside perspective, asked the inconvenient questions. But she had rarely seen him do it, and she didn't think that was because she was doing it for him. She'd come along not a moment too soon.

She was also keenly aware that she'd been duped. It would take her a long time to pick the lies and evasions out of the skein of truths, and figure out what it was she should have been able to see, but there was no question in her mind that he had pulled the wool over her eyes about something.

As long as ignorance didn't impede her plans, what he'd concealed wasn't all that important. It was probably something about Daniel, and she'd find out herself, when they got him back.

And then she was going to have a very long chat with him about General O'Neill.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

After he hung the framed card back up, Jack opened his door and poked his head out. "They get the ship?"

"Yes, sir," Abrams replied. "And the retasking's taken care of, and Sergeant Zankowski's on his way over, and I rescheduled your 1530 for 0700 tomorrow. Your driver will have coffee for you in the vehicle when he picks you up."

"Super-sized?"

"Super-sized, sir."

"And the other thing?"

"No joy, sir."

"Down in flames?"

"Uncooperative. To the bitter end, sir."

"Gotcha. I'll go sign those ... whatevers you left on my desk. Chen can come in when she's ready. Zankowski first if he gets here first."

"Yes, sir."

That made three dead this week, seven total. Two left in custody, and he'd send some patrols out trolling for more in that ship Mal Doran provided them -- they could hold off reporting its retrieval to the Tok'ra for a few days. At least this last one went down swinging; the recalibrated settings on the device kept him from self-immolating before the interrogation ran its course. None of the captured Priors had been able to overpower the thing -- yet -- but some of them retained the ability to self-combust under extreme duress, and nobody could figure out what the difference was. Carter might, or McKay, or even Lee, but their taskings took precedence. Which was for the best, because this kind of shit left scars on your soul that never healed, and if he involved any one of those three, they'd lose a piece of what made them who they were and he'd lose a brilliant mind. The first six had given up some useful stuff, and the interrogators were adapting and refining.

They'd call him in if it came down to the last one. He wasn't happy about that; had enough scars on his soul, thanks, left a trail of soul-chunks across three continents and ten years of his life. But he'd do whatever it took to get Daniel back, and if there was anything human left in any Prior they turned him loose on ... Well. He could be a scary guy when he was motivated.

Maybe it wouldn't come to that. He'd left instructions to prioritize the status and location of Doctor Jackson, cut a deal with the first one of them to crack and give up that much, use the example as incentive to the rest.

After a conference with Woolsey and Hammond that bore ironic similarities to the talk he'd just had with Mal Doran.

Underneath all the bullshit and self-delusion and attempts at manipulation, what she'd really needed to know was whether her personal investment was interfering with her judgment. Lucky for Woolsey and Hammond he'd had a little more experience with the personal-investment thing, and knew how to ask the question straight out and get an answer he believed.

Not that he'd have given her a straight answer if she had asked him straight out. He needed that team doing exactly what it was doing -- going out there, _being_ out there, for Daniel to find -- and he didn't have time to clean up the mess Daniel had made of a woman who'd been a lot more valuable before he sanded her edge off. She knew he'd snowed her about something, for example, but she didn't know what; the Vala Mal Doran who'd hijacked _Prometheus_ would have cut right through his Machiavellian crap to the truth, but Daniel had managed to make a naif of her, which was a pretty damn impressive screwup. That had to get fixed asap. After they had Daniel back.

The upshot was that he was getting the result he wanted, which these days he usually did. She'd go back and do her job, with more conviction than she'd had before.

And with no idea, not the first foggiest vaguest fucking idea, how far outside the rules he could play.

**Author's Note:**

> [Steal Dancing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8901) is another take on the characters during this time, Jack/Vala with a Jack/Daniel background, graphic sex. [Waiting for ~~Godot~~](http://archiveofourown.org/works/23176) is a minimalist/existential/WTF?? take on them.


End file.
